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11 May 2006, 18:40

Here goesâ€¦.

Scheduling:
I started studying 3 months before my target test day. Because I have a flexible schedule, I decided not to set the test date until I felt ready. Good idea. By my targeted day, I still did not feel ready, so I pushed it off for another three weeks. It was hard to do, but I finally scheduled the test.

Prep course:

I took a prep course in Manhattan called VERITAS PREP (if anyone is thinking about taking this course, PM me and I will be happy to answer questions). My instructorâ€™s name was Chris (you da man!). After the prep course, I got a few hours of private tutoring.

General Prep method:
Do as many practice tests as possible, and familiarize yourself with the OG!

Do not do any CATs untill you have studied all of your other prep material. If you use them too early, it will be a waste and there are only a very limited amount of accurate CATs.

If you want you GMAT PREP scores to be accurate:
DO NOT look at any gmat prep questions on the forum or anywhere, or even look at any regular questions on the forum (unless they are labeled clearly that they are not gmat prep)
DO NOT do the OG at all before doing gmat prep. (the diagnostics are safe I think)

Contrary to the advice of most users of this forum, I spent the entire day before the test studying and doing practice tests. I think that helped me a lot.

Night before the test:

Went to sleep at 11:00, didnâ€™t fall asleep till 1:30, was really nervous.

Morning of the test:

Got to the test center 2 hours early, went in and looked around to familiarize myself with the place. I asked a lot of questions. I bought a box of pop-em entemans glazed donuts and 3 vitamin water drinks. I drank the drinks and ate the donuts before and during the breaks of the test. While I was waiting to start the test, I took out the OG and started to do some problems. They told me I wasnâ€™t allowed to study in the waiting area so I went downstairs and found a table and chair. I did some D.S., P.S, and S.C.. Doing this turned out to be a great help, because on the test I had a question that basically came straight from an OG problem I had just done, just with different numbers. Went into the test center, and checked in. they fingerprinted, and took a picture of me and told me to remove all personal belongings from my pockets. I was then led in to start my test.

During the test:

AWA- sped right through it

Quant was a killer, I felt miserable, and thought I would score in the low 40â€™s or high 30â€™s. You can imagine how thrilled I was when I saw the 49 in quant on the screen. Surprisingly, throughout the test, I had NO, permutations/combinations, NO work rate, and NO Coordinate geometry! Being that the test is computer adaptive, I know that was seeing hard questions means your doing, well. However, during the test I thought I was seeing easy questions and just wasnâ€™t able to figure them out. Question number four was a very hard number properties question and I realized I had no chance on it, so I just guessed and moved on. I felt like I was doing horrible. I even thought about canceling my score! The worst was the second to last question I had on the test. It was the easiest question I had ever seen in any prep material. It was a joke. When I saw it, I thought, I must be doing really horrible. I guess I was wrong. NEVER CANCEL YOUR!

Verbal was much different, much more relaxing. I had NO boldface! I thought I would do better on verbal. Was surprised I only got a 41. GMAT prep a few days before I got a 45.
Clicked to see my score and was very happy! 730!

THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW:

You can not wear any type of watch during the test. (thought it was limited to alarm watches)

You should test the marker they give you on the note board before you go in to the test. I tested mine and the marker didnâ€™t work. I got a new marker right then, instead of wasting valuable quant time. (I donâ€™t write anything in AWA, so I wouldnâ€™t have realized till quant).

When coming back from the break, and returning to my seat, I wanted to spend the last few minutes of my break at my seat just relaxing. You canâ€™t do that. When you sign back in after the break, the proctor comes with you to your seat and signs you in. The next section starts immediately. You can not enjoy the break at your seat once you come back in.

If you wear a jacket in to the test room, you can not take it off during the test. You must wear it the whole time. They are afraid people will try to block the video cameras or something.